Policy brief 30, April 2014 Authors: Alexandra Toderita, Cristian Ghinea, Lucian Luca. The reform of the Common Agricultural Policy offers a wide array of financing possibilities, but leaves many implementation details to the Members States.
CRPE’s report “How is Romania capitalizing the CAP Reform. CRPE’s comments concerning the NRDP 2014-2020 project and its interaction with Axis 1 (direct payments)” is analyzing the main novelties proposed by the NRDP program and focuses on several aspects regarding the interaction with the other sector on European Funds for Agriculture – the Axis for Direct Payments.
The authors consider that the current form of the new NRDP denotes a more connected vision concerning the necessities of Romanian agriculture: family farms are helped being competitive on the market, is created a new sub thematic program concerning the fruit growing sector, there are incentives offered for young people to involve in agriculture, the cooperation measure allows (through the shorts chains sub measure) to attract individualised support in order to create market orientated agricultural associations and cooperatives, model proposed and documented by CRPE during the Romanian American Foundation program, “Rural development trough Entrepreneurship and Association”.
An important aspect, not included in the current form of NRDP, is represented by the tools that could boost the adjustment of farm structures in Romania (extremely fragmented). Since 2011, CRPE suggested the life annuity policy, policy that decreased the number of small farms between 1 and 10 ha during the period of implementation, and produced other positive side effects. The New Common Agricultural Policy gives the possibility to adopt a new policy – Small Farmers’ Scheme – which, among others, would follow the same objectives as the life annuity policy and, moreover, would stimulate the small landowners that who are not economically exploiting them to sell or lease their land for the next seven years and, in return, receiving 120% of the grant offered by the sub measure Transfer payments (Axis 2) in order to exit the Small Farmers’ Scheme (Axis 1). Recent statements by Government officials leave room to introduce this scheme in the new NRDP.